Reagan’s démarche at Reykjavik briefly shook her confidence in the American alliance. But her wobble did not last long. Having gained the reassurance she sought, at least for the moment, she redoubled her commitment to NATO. She was still alarmed by the speed with which the Americans were pressing on with INF cuts and then cuts in short-range battlefield weapons. She worried that the Russians were skilfully drawing the Americans into agreements which undermined the West’s deterrent capability; while Reagan’s willingness to do a private deal with Gorbachev still gave her nightmares. But she took comfort from the fact that, as she told a CBS interviewer in July 1987, ‘they did not come to an agreement… It did not happen.’ She was determined to see that it never happened; but she admits in her memoirs that the unshakeable importance of nuclear deterrence was ‘the one issue on which I knew I could not take the Reagan Administration’s soundness for granted’.107
At the same time, paradoxically, her other special relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev flourished, highlighted by a triumphal visit to Moscow in March 1987. This was a shameless piece of pre-election theatre designed to play well on television screens at home, projecting the Prime Minister as a world leader as welcome in the Kremlin as she was in the White House.
First, she had another seven hours of formal talks with Gorbachev, plus several social meetings. As before, their conversation ranged widely from the relative merits of Communism and capitalism to regional conflicts, arms control and the future of nuclear weapons. Once again Gorbachev gave as good as he got, rejecting Mrs Thatcher’s criticism of Soviet subversion in Africa and Central America and meeting her lectures about human rights by pointing out the inequality of British society. But when she repeated her objection that eliminating strategic weapons would leave the Russians with conventional superiority in Europe, he admitted Moscow’s opposite fear of being unable to match America’s military spending. ‘He was clearly extremely sensitive and worried about being humiliated by the West.’108
Just as important as her talks with Gorbachev, however, was the fact that she was also allowed to meet privately a number of prominent dissidents, most notably the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena, who were now supporting Gorbachev’s perestroika, and a number of Jewish refuseniks who exemplified its limits. She was permitted to attend a Russian Orthodox service at Zagorsk, forty-five miles outside Moscow, where she spoke to some of the worshippers and lit a candle symbolising freedom of conscience. Above all she was granted unprecedented access to the Soviet public. She was given fifty minutes unedited prime time on the main television channel, and she seized her chance brilliantly. Rather than talk straight to camera she insisted on being interviewed, so that she could be seen to argue with her three interviewers in the same way that she argued with Gorbachev. When they dutifully trotted out the party line and questioned how she could support nuclear weapons, she repeatedly interrupted them, contradicted them and tried to convince them from Russia’s own experience of invasion and war. ‘The Soviet Union suffered millions of losses in the Second World War,’ she reminded them:
The Soviet Union had a lot of conventional weapons. That did not stop Hitler attacking her. Conventional weapons have never been enough to stop wars. Since we have had the nuclear weapon, it is so horrific that no one dare risk going to war.
At the same time she told them bluntly that the Soviet Union had far more nuclear weapons than any other country; that it was the Soviet Union which had introduced intermediate-range weapons by deploying SS-20s, forcing the West to match them with Pershing and cruise; and the Soviet Union which had led the United States in developing anti-missile laser defences in the 1970s. The three stooges had no answer to this assault. The impact of her spontaneity was sensational. ‘Her style, her appearance, her frankness about security matters made her appear like a creature from another planet,’ wrote the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Martin Walker, ‘ – and they found her terrific.’109
Finally, she undertook an unprecedented walkabout in a Moscow housing estate, meeting and talking to ordinary Russians who flocked to meet and touch her. ‘Journalists with no liking for her at all came back from Moscow saying that they had never witnessed anything like it.’110 The experience confirmed her faith that the peoples of the Soviet empire would eventually throw off their yoke. Her 1987 visit – for which Gorbachev also deserves credit – was almost certainly a factor in hastening the collapse of the Soviet system only three years later.
Undoubtedly Lady Thatcher played a part in the sudden ending of the Cold War in 1989 – 91. In retirement, she counted her championing of Gorbachev among her greatest achievements. But how much influence she really had is questionable. Events in the Soviet Union had a momentum of their own which even Gorbachev was unable to control. She certainly helped convince Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could never win the arms race, that Reagan would not give up ‘Star Wars’ but was nevertheless serious in wanting to engage in balanced arms reductions. Her relationship with Reagan and to a lesser extent with Gorbachev enabled her to punch – or at least appear to punch – above Britain’s real weight in the world. For a heady time in the late 1980s she almost seemed to have recreated the wartime triumvirate of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. But her role should not be exaggerated. Just as in 1945, only more so, Britain was always the junior partner. It was the Americans who called the shots; and the brief illusion of equality was swiftly exposed when Reagan was succeeded by George Bush.
Meanwhile, her love affair with America pulled Britain away from Europe.
17
Iron Lady II: Europe and the World
Good European
DURING Mrs Thatcher’s first term her relations with her European partners had been poisoned by the interminable wrangle over Britain’s contribution to the Community budget. Later, her third term would be dominated by her increasingly bitter opposition to closer economic integration. Despite her strong bias towards the United States, however, her middle period (1983–7) was an interlude of improving relations with Europe. It was, as it turned out, only a temporary calm between two storms; but once the budget question had finally been resolved at Fontainebleau in June 1984, Britain actually took the lead for a time in Community affairs, with Mrs Thatcher the leading advocate of a rapid completion of the single European market.
Even in her most positive period, however, she set in hand no long-term thinking about the future of Europe or Britain’s place in it. She simply dismissed as fantasy the idea that there could ever be a ‘United States of Europe in the same way that there is a United States of America’;1 and assumed that her own idea of what the EC should be – a free-trade area and a forum for loose cooperation between sovereign nations – would naturally prevail.2 As a result, from lack of imaginative empathy with other views and lack of her usual thorough homework, she failed to take seriously the fact that most other European governments had a quite different conception of how Europe should develop. They had given a good deal more thought to how to achieve their goal than she ever did to how she might prevent it.
Her relations with her Community partners were greatly improved in 1981 by the replacement of the haughty and supercilious Giscard d’Estaing as President of France by the veteran socialist François Mitterrand. Though on the face of it Mitterrand and Mrs Thatcher might have been thought to be chalk and cheese, they actually got on unexpectedly well. First, he was a very sexy man with the confidence to treat her as a woman – and she responded, as she often did to a sexual challenge. Far more explicitly than with Reagan, there was an erotic undercurrent in her relations with Mitterrand which predisposed her to like him. It was he who famously – and to the bewilderment of her British critics – described her as having ‘the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’.3 The former were undisputed, but it took a Frenchman to appreciate the latter.
Second, she quickly found that Mitterrand, though nominally a socialist, was a patriotic socialist – ‘unlike ours’, as she once tartly tol
d Harold Evans.4 Ten years older than Giscard (who was slightly younger than Mrs Thatcher), Mitterrand had fought in the Resistance and was still grateful for British support in the war. When he visited London in September 1981 the Foreign Office cleverly managed to find the pilot who had flown him to England in 1940. He was as firmly committed to maintaining the French independent force de frappe as she was to the British nuclear deterrent, and thus shared her alarm at SDI and Reagan’s bilateral negotiations at Reykjavik.
Third, quite early in their relationship Mitterrand won her undying gratitude by his prompt and unequivocal support for Britain’s cause in the Falklands. Mrs Thatcher never forgot this timely assistance. For the rest of the decade there persisted a strong mutual respect between Mrs Thatcher and Mitterrand which transcended their political differences.
By contrast, she never warmed to Helmut Kohl, who succeeded Helmut Schmidt as Chancellor of West Germany in 1982. She was as glad to see the back of Schmidt as she was of Giscard; but she thought Kohl boring, clumsy and provincial and persistently underestimated him. A huge man with a dominating physical presence and an enormous appetite, he perfectly embodied her resentment of Germany’s post-war prosperity, which was never far below the surface. At first she patronised Kohl (as Schmidt and Giscard patronised her). But the longer he survived, as he grew in political stature and increasingly came to rival her as the dominant figure in Europe, the more her dislike grew. Kohl tried hard to woo her: but she would not be wooed.
She regarded every European summit as another battle in a protracted war to defend British interests against the greedy and scheming foreigners. More than this, she despised the whole ethos of compromise, deal-making and fudge, which was how the Community worked. ‘She was quite simply too straight, too direct, too principled and altogether too serious for them’, in Bernard Ingham’s view.5 But by disdaining to play by the Community’s prevailing rules she reduced her own effectiveness and damaged British interests.
After five years of wrangling, she finally achieved a budget settlement which satisfied her in June 1984. Up until then she continued to block all other progress in the EC – on VAT payments and reform of the Common Agricultural Policy – until she got her way. The three-year deal secured by Peter Carrington in 1981 was about to expire. In the end she settled for less than she wanted – a 66 per cent rebate, not the ‘well over 70 per cent’ which had been her goal.6 She also accepted an increase from 1 per cent to 1.4 per cent of each country’s VAT returns that should be payable to the Community. The critical fact was that Mitterrand wanted a settlement under the French presidency. Mrs Thatcher knew that this was her best chance, and wisely took it. The other countries were just relieved that the ‘Bloody British Question’ was resolved at last.
With the budget dispute finally settled, it certainly appeared that Britain was now ready to play a more constructive role. The rest of the Community was also ready to open a new chapter, marked by the appointment of an energetic new President of the Commission – Jacques Delors, formerly Mitterrand’s Finance Minister. With hindsight, Mrs Thatcher dismissed Delors as a typical French Socialist. But she was largely instrumental in his appointment, since she vetoed the first French candidate, Claude Cheysson. Delors had impressed the British as tough and practical: he had been responsible for scrapping most of the left-wing policies on which Mitterrand had been elected and implementing instead what Howe called ‘our policies’.7 Delors was indeed tough and practical, but he was also a European visionary, as she soon discovered.
Taking office in January 1985, Delors quickly fixed on the completion of the single market as the next big advance in the evolution of the Community. He looked first at other areas – common defence policy, progress towards a single currency, the reform of Community institutions – but he could not get sufficient agreement on any of these. So he settled for what he called ‘les quatre libertés’ – free movement of goods, services, capital and people. This Mrs Thatcher was happy to go along with. It seemed consistent with her idea of the Community as essentially a free-trade area – a true common market – and an opportunity for advancing Thatcherite economic ideas of deregulation and free enterprise on a European scale. Carried away with her vision of Thatcherising the Community, she did not realise that Delors – and Mitterrand and Kohl and almost all the smaller countries – saw the single market as part of a wider process of European integration.
At first, however, all went swimmingly. She appointed Arthur Cockfield as one of Britain’s two members of the new Commission. He wasted no time in publishing a detailed programme entitled Completing the Internal Market, listing 292 specific measures of deregulation to be achieved by 1992. Mrs Thatcher was delighted. This, she thought, was Britain at last leading the Community, as pro-Europeans had aspired to do ever since Macmillan first applied for membership, and extending to the overgoverned Continent the benefits of British free enterprise. But it was not so simple as that. Mrs Thatcher did not understand that creating a single market necessarily involved not just deregulation, but the harmonisation of regulations across the Community, which impinged on matters hitherto the prerogative of national governments. In her view Cockfield, in his missionary zeal for the project to which she had appointed him, betrayed her by straying too far into the forbidden area of integration. Like practically every British politician who has ever been appointed to Brussels, he ‘went native’ and adopted a quasi-federalist perspective. Though the rest of the Community regarded him as a conspicuous success, Mrs Thatcher declined to reappoint Cockfield for a second term.
In the meantime, however, in order to make progress on the single market, she realised that she would have to acquiesce in other developments which she subsequently came to regret. The so-called Single European Act – Delors’ major initiative to carry the process of European integration forward – extended the application of weighted majority voting into new areas and increased the powers of both the Commission and the Parliament. Mrs Thatcher was afraid that the completion of the single market would be held up by other countries exercising their national vetoes, and positively bullied her partners to accept majority voting in this area.
She did what she could to block what she regarded as the most utopian proposals and drove forward agreement on the practical measures required to implement the single market, believing that the wider implications of the new treaty were no more than woolly aspirations which would come to nothing. In particular she believed that she had qualified the ‘irrevocable’ commitment to economic and monetary union (EMU) originally signed up to by Heath, Brandt and Pompidou in 1972, substituting instead a reference to economic and monetary ‘co-operation’; and also that she had preserved the right of national veto in such sensitive areas as border controls, customs and drugs policy, and indeed any matter which any member country regarded as vital, under the so-called Luxembourg Compromise.
As a result of these assurances, the Single European Act was whipped through Parliament with scarcely a murmur of dissent. The Labour party was in the process of reversing its former opposition to all things European, while Tory Eurosceptics – as they were later called – believing that Mrs Thatcher shared their antipathy to any hint of federalism, trusted in her vigilance and accepted her assurances that they had nothing to worry about. In fact, whatever she and the Foreign Office believed, the Single European Act as interpreted in Brussels did very significantly extend the powers of both the Commission and the Strasbourg Parliament, and led on logically to the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 and eventually to the single currency.
The fact is that Mrs Thatcher ‘gave away’ more sovereignty in 1985 than Heath in 1973 or Major in 1992. She subsequently claimed that she was deceived by the other leaders who broke assurances that they had given her. ‘I trusted them,’ she recalled bitterly in 1996. ‘I believed in them. I believed this was good faith between nations co-operating together. So we got our fingers burned. Once you’ve got your fingers burned, you don’t go and burn them again.’8 But the idea
that Mrs Thatcher, of all people, did not read the Act closely before signing it is incredible to anyone who knew her. David Williamson, Secretary-General of the Community from 1987, recalled her telling him specifically, ‘I have read every word of the Single European Act.’9 So why did she sign it? Bernard Ingham thought she knew what she was doing: ‘I think she knew at the time that she was taking risks… She was taking a calculated risk with a very clear view in mind.’10 In other words, she believed that the substantial bird in the hand was worth a flock of shadows in the bush. Delors confirms this interpretation, recalling that she hesitated and asked for an extra few minutes to think about it before she signed.11
As usual, she blames others, but has only herself to blame. Blinded by the strength of her own conviction, she did not understand the equal strength of the other leaders’ will to maintain the momentum of economic, political and social integration. She believed that she had preserved Britain’s essential independence by steadfastly refusing to join the ERM, and trusted in her ability to continue to do so. Having got what she wanted – the single market – she believed she could send back the rest of the menu.
Yet MrsThatcher did, ironically, sanction one powerfully symbolic act of European integration – the old dream of linking Britain physically to the Continent by building a Channel tunnel. This was a project she had strongly supported as a member of Ted Heath’s Government in the early 1970s.When the incoming Labour Government scrapped it in 1974, she condemned their short-sighted penny-pinching, arguing – somewhat out of character – that the country could not live on bread and cheese alone but needed some ‘visionary ideas’ as well.12 Now, as Prime Minister, she still liked the idea of a ‘grand project’, but insisted that it would have to be financed and built entirely by private enterprise. Initially it seemed that this condition would be enough to sink the project.
The Iron Lady Page 38
